Journalism in America, and perhaps everywhere, works according to unacknowledged templates in which the reporter fills in blanks, thus saving him the nuisance of thought, for which he is generally not well suited anyway. In matters of race, it also saves him from being drawn and quartered for Crime Thought. If he follows the template, he is safe. Stupidity, sloth, and cowardice are thus fertilized.
A favorite template is: evil racist white cop shoots meritorious black because the cop hates blacks.
This is twaddle. Why is it twaddle? Because every white cop knows that if he shoots a black, he will first be savaged in the local and quite likely the national media. He will then be suspended and probably fired, losing both income and years toward retirement. An ambitious prosecutor will charge him with murder and, in the cities, a black jury will lynch him. A civil suit may follow, led by a lawyer seeking a national reputation. The cop, freshly fired, will not be able to pay his legal bills or his mortgage.
Do you really think he is going to do this to himself intentionally?
A variation on the template is: evil white cop deliberately shoots unarmed meritorious black. The “deliberately” part is tacit but strongly implied. The cop usually says he thought the dead guy had a gun. The media dismiss this with an implicit “Oh, sure.”
Let us play a little game in the peace and security of your living room. You will be a cop responding to an armed-robbery call at a Seven-Eleven, and you will have your pistol in your hand. I will play the robber, initially with my back to you as you enter the store. I will tell you before the game begins that I will have in my hand, close to my body, either a (toy) gun or a dayglo-yellow plastic banana.
You will yell “Freeze!” or something else suitably dramatic. I will then turn, very fast—which is how it would go down in real life—and point the object in my hand at you. Your job is to decide to shoot me or not.
If I am holding the gun, and you don’t shoot, I will, and for a month or so your kids will say, “Mommy, why doesn’t Daddy come back?” If I am holding the banana and you do shoot, you just killed an unarmed kid, he was such a nice boy, everybody liked him, it was a banana for god’s sake. The joker in this deck is that I will, every time, be able to get a round or two off before you can shoot—if you wait to see what I am holding—because you have to make a decision and I don’t. Do you see how this might make for an unstable evening?
That’s in your living room. Try it for real.
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